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Desperate, she gripped her knife and carved a shaky question mark into her upper thigh, deep enough to leave scars that might reappear as thin white lines on Kitay’s skin. They’d communicated this way once before; it had to work again. She carved another mark. Then another. She sliced her thigh bloody. But Kitay never answered.
Tikany was shrouded in terrified silence when she returned from the fields. No one seemed to know what to do. Here and there Rin saw desultory efforts at rescue and reconstruction. A triage center was set up on the bonfire grounds, where the bombs had hit hardest, but Rin saw only two physicians and one assistant, hardly enough to deal with the lines of the wounded stretching around the square. Here and there she saw soldiers clearing away rubble or making futile attempts to create temporary shelters from the hollowed pits where once had stood buildings. But most of the survivors, civilians and soldiers both, just stood around looking dazed, as if they still couldn’t quite believe what had just happened.
No one was giving orders.
Rin supposed she should have been the one giving the orders.
But she, too, walked about in a helpless fugue. She didn’t know what to say. Every order, every action she could possibly take seemed utterly pointless. How could they come back from this?
She couldn’t turn back time. She couldn’t bring back the dead.
Don’t be pathetic, Altan would have said. She could hear his voice loud and clear, as if he were standing right beside her. Stop being such a little brat. So you lost. You’re still alive. Pick up the pieces and figure out how to start over.
She took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and tried to at least act like she knew what she was doing.
Back to the basics. She had to know what assets she still had, and what she had lost. She needed to determine what her fighting capabilities were. She had to gather her officers.
She seized the arm of the first Iron Wolf she saw. “Where’s Souji?”
She wouldn’t have been surprised if he said he didn’t know. Most of the Iron Wolves were milling about, looking just as confused and disoriented as the rest. But she wasn’t prepared for the look of terror that came over his face.
He looked as if she’d just threatened to kill him.
He paused before he answered. “Ah, not here, ma’am—”
“I can see that,” she snapped. “Find him for me. Tell him I want to see him. Right now.”
The Iron Wolf seemed to be trying to decide something. He had a strange look in his eye that Rin couldn’t quite read. Defiance? Mere disorientation? She opened her mouth to ask again, but he gave her a curt nod and headed off toward the wreckage.
She returned to the general’s complex, one of the few buildings left intact thanks to its solid stone foundations. She sat behind the desk, pulled out a sheaf of planning documents from a drawer, and spread them on her desk. Then she started to think.
The opium was nearly gone from her bloodstream. Her mental clarity had returned. Her mind went back to the cool, logical plane where strategy existed outside the friction of war. It felt familiar, calming. She could do this. She’d been trained for this.
For a moment she forgot the trauma of what she’d just seen, forgot the million hurts lacerating her body, and busied herself with next steps. She’d start with the tasks that she didn’t need Souji for. First things first: She gathered a handful of reliable runners and ordered them to make assessments as quickly as possible. She took stock of how many men she had left based on triage reports and corpse counts. She wrote down a list of basic necessities the army would need to recover, find, or build within the next twenty-four hours—means of transportation, food stores, and shelter. She reread spy reports on the Republic’s last known troop positions. That intelligence was clearly outdated, but it helped to know where the gaps in their knowledge were.
Then she tried to work out a way to destroy those damned dirigibles.
She could deal with arquebuses—they were more or less just faster, more lethal crossbows. But the fucking airships changed the landscape of battle, added an extra dimension on which she couldn’t compete. She needed a way to bring them down.
She started by sketching out her best recollection of their build. She wished they’d managed to ground even one of those dirigibles for study, but memory would have to do for now. The images in her mind’s eye were fuzzy; she had to focus through visions of smoke and thunder to recall where the cannons were positioned, how the passenger cradles were affixed to the balloons.
She knew one thing—the airships were frustratingly well-designed. They were heavily armored from below, with no visible chinks at which to aim, and they floated too high in the air for arrows or cannons to reach. The balloons that kept the dirigibles afloat made more promising targets. If she could puncture them she could send the whole ship crashing down. But they seemed to have been plated with some kind of light metal just strong enough to deflect arrowheads, and she’d never gotten a cannonball high enough to see what happened when they collided.
Rockets, then? Could they get the trajectory right? How much explosive force would those rockets need? And how would she organize those ground artillery forces?
She crumpled her diagram in frustration. These sorts of problems were Kitay’s domain. He was her engineer, her problem solver. She devised grand schemes, but Kitay figured out the details. He would have cracked this already, would have already begun crafting together some idiotic invention that still somehow worked.
A pain that had nothing to do with her injuries stabbed at her chest and spread like blades splintering into daggers, gouging at her heart like grappling hooks. She gasped, then clenched her mouth with her hand.
Tears dripped down her fingers. She couldn’t do this alone. Gods, she missed him so much.
Stop that, Altan admonished. Stop being such a fucking baby.
Kitay was gone. Bitching and moaning wouldn’t change that. All she could do now was focus on getting him back.
She set her drawings aside. She wouldn’t be able to solve this now. She had to think about basic survival, had to get what was left of the army through the night. For that she needed Souji, but he still hadn’t appeared.
She frowned. Why hadn’t he appeared? It had been over an hour. She hadn’t seen him since the attack, but surely he wasn’t dead or captured—she would have known by now. She stood up and strode to the door. She jumped, startled, when she saw the same Iron Wolf from earlier standing on the other side, hand raised as if he’d been about to knock. Souji was nowhere in sight.
“Where is he?” she demanded.
The Iron Wolf cleared his throat. “Souji requests that you meet him in his tent.”
That immediately struck Rin as suspicious. Souji had made his quarters in the general’s complex like the rest of the army leadership. What the hell was he doing in his tent? “Is he joking? I’ve been waiting for over an hour now, and he thinks he can just summon me?”
The Iron Wolf’s expression remained studiedly blank. “That’s all he said. I can take you if you like.”
For a moment Rin considered refusing the summons. Who did Souji think he was? She outranked him. He wore the collar of authority around his neck. How dare he make her wait, how dare—
She bit her tongue before she said something rash.
